While object-oriented programming is being embraced in industry, particularly in the form of C++ and to an increasing extent Java and Python, its acceptance by the parallel scientific programming community is still tentative. In this latter domain performance is invariably of paramount importance, where even C++ is considered suspect, primarily because of real or perceived loss of performance. On the other hand, various factors practically dictate the use of language features that provide higher level abstractions than do C or older FORTRAN standards. These include increasingly complex physics models, numerical algorithms, and hardware---deep memory hierarchies, exponentially-increasing numbers of processors, and the advent of multi-core, many-core, and accelerated heterogeneous processors.

This workshop seeks to bring together practitioners and researchers in this growing field to `compare notes' on their work. The emphasis is on identifying specific problems impeding greater acceptance and widespread use of object-oriented programming in scientific computing; proposed and implemented solutions to these problems; and new or novel approaches, techniques or idioms for scientific and/or parallel computing. Presentations of work in progress are welcome.

Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• alternatives or extensions to mainstream object-oriented languages (e.g. C++, Java);
• performance issues and their realized or proposed resolution;
• issues specific to handling or abstracting parallelism, including the handling or abstraction of heterogeneous/multicore/accelerated microarchitectures;
• higher level languages (e.g. domain specific languages) or their embedding into OO languages to support parallelism or specific tasks in scientific computing
• frameworks and tools for scientific object-oriented computing;
• proposed or realized solutions to problems hindering acceptance of object-oriented scientific computing;
• grand visions (of relevance).

The workshop will consist of a sequences of presentations each followed by a discussion session. The workshop will conclude with an overall discussion. We expect the majority of the participants to give presentations.

NOTE: Full papers are not required for acceptance/presentation, but they are strongly encouraged.

For authors of accepted presentations who require justification for travel the organizers can provide official letters of invitation.

PUBLICATION

Full papers accepted to the workshop will be published as a workshop proceedings in the ACM Digital Library.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Prospective authors are invited to submit abstracts, papers, or presentations (slides) in ASCII, PDF, postscript, or PowerPoint. Submitted materials will be distributed at the workshop. Submission and email correspondence to poosc09@lanl.gov

IMPORTANT DATES

• April 8, 2009 : Initial submissions due;

  Deadline extended to April 22.

• May 8, 2009: Notification of acceptance;
• May 20, 2009: ECOOP early registration deadline;
• Jun 15, 2009: Final versions of materials to be distributed due;
• Jul 7, 2009: Workshop.

ORGANIZATION

This workshop is a joint organization by Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA; and the Technical University of Regensburg, Germany.

FURTHER INFORMATION

http://www.c3.lanl.gov/poosc/